Louis Gossett Jr., the first black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the television miniseries “Roots,” has died. He was 87 years old.
Neil Gossett, Gossett's first cousin, told The Associated Press that the actor died in Santa Monica, California. A statement from the family said Gossett died Friday morning. The cause of death was not revealed.
Gossett's cousin remembered the man who walked with Nelson Mandela and who also told a great joke, a relative who faced racism and fought it with dignity and good humour.
“Never mind the awards, never mind the glitz and glamor, the Rolls Royces and the big houses in Malibu. It's about the humanity of the people he stood for,” his cousin said.
Louis Gossett always thought the beginning of his career was a reverse Cinderella story, and he managed to find it from an early age and push it forward, towards an Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman.
Gossett appeared on the small screen as a violinist in the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots, which depicted the atrocities of slavery on television. The sprawling cast included Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton, and John Amos.
Gossett became the third black Oscar nominee in the supporting actor category in 1983. He won it for his performance as an intimidating naval drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” opposite Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won a Golden Globe Award for the same role.
“More than anything else, it was a huge validation of my status as a black actor,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, “An Actor and a Gentleman.”
He earned his first acting credit in his Brooklyn high school's production of “You Can't Take It with You” while being sidelined from the basketball team due to an injury.
“I was hooked – and so was my audience,” he wrote in his memoirs.
His English teacher urged him to go to Manhattan to try out “Take a Giant Step.” He got the role and made his Broadway debut in 1953 when he was 16 years old.
“I knew too little to be nervous,” Gossett wrote. “In retrospect, I should have been scared to death when I walked on that stage, but I didn't.”
Gossett attended New York University on a basketball and drama scholarship. Soon he was acting and singing on television shows hosted by David Susskind, Ed Sullivan, the Red Buttons, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar, and Steve Allen.
Gossett became friendly with James Dean and studied acting with Marilyn Monroe, Martin Landau and Steve McQueen at a branch of the Actors Studio taught by Frank Silvera.
In 1959, Gossett received critical acclaim for his role in the Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun” alongside Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands.
He became a star on Broadway, replacing Billy Daniels in “Golden Boy” with Sammy Davis Jr. in 1964.
Gossett first went to Hollywood in 1961 to produce the film version of A Raisin in the Sun. He had bitter memories of that trip, staying in a cockroach-infested hotel that was one of the few places where blacks were allowed inside.
In 1968, he returned to Hollywood to play the lead role in “Companions in Nightmare,” NBC's first television movie starring Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter, and Patrick O'Neill.
This time, Gossett was booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Universal Studios rented him a convertible. While returning to the hotel after picking up the car, a Los Angeles County sheriff's officer stopped him and ordered him to turn off the radio and put the roof down before letting him go.
Within minutes, he was stopped by eight police officers, who leaned him against the car and made him open the trunk while they called the car rental agency before letting him go.
“Although I realized I had no choice but to endure this abuse, it was a terrible way to treat me, and a degrading way to feel,” Gossett wrote in his memoir. “I realized this was happening because I was black and was showing off a luxury car — which, in their view, I had no right to drive.”
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped a block away by a police officer, who told him he had broken a curfew in the Beverly Hills residential area after 9 p.m. Two more officers arrived and Gossett said he was chained to a house. Tree and handcuffed for three hours. He was eventually released when the original police car returned.
“Now I came face to face with racism, and it was an ugly sight,” he wrote. “But it wouldn't have destroyed me.”
In the late 1990s, Gossett said police stopped him on the Pacific Coast Highway while driving a restored 1986 Rolls-Royce Corniche II. The officer told him he looked like the person they were looking for, but the officer recognized Gossett and left.
He founded the Eracism Foundation to help create a world where racism does not exist.
Gossett has made a series of guest appearances on shows such as “Bonanza,” “The Rockford Files,” “The Mod Squad,” “McCloud,” and a memorable role with Richard Pryor on “The Partridge Family.”
In August 1969, Gossett was partying with members of the Mamas and Papas when they were invited to actor Sharon Tate's home. Head home first to shower and change clothes. As he was preparing to leave, he heard breaking news on television about Tate's murder. She and others were killed by associates of Charles Manson that night.
“There has to be a reason I survived that bullet,” he wrote.
Louis Cameron Gossett was born on May 27, 1936, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, to parents Louis Sr., a porter, and Helen, a nurse. He later added the son to his name in honor of his father.
“The Oscar gave me the ability to pick good roles in films like Enemy Mine, Sadat, and Iron Eagle,” Gossett said in Dave Karger’s 2024 book “50 Oscar Nights.”
He said his statue was in storage.
“I'm going to donate it to a library so I don't have to monitor it,” he said in the book. “I need to be free of it.”
Gossett has appeared in such television films as “The Story of Satchel Paige,” “Backtiers at the White House,” “The Josephine Baker Story,” for which he won another Golden Globe, and “Roots Revisited.”
But he said that winning the Oscar did not change the fact that all of his roles were supporting roles.
He played the stubborn patriarch in the 2023 remake of “The Color Purple.”
Gossett struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction for years after his Oscar win. He went to rehab, where he was diagnosed with toxic mold syndrome, which he attributed to his Malibu home.
In 2010, Gossett announced that he had prostate cancer, which he said was discovered in the early stages. In 2020, he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
He is also survived by children Satie, a producer and director from his second marriage, and Sharon, a chef whom he adopted after seeing the 7-year-old in a television segment about children in desperate situations. His first cousin is actor Robert Gossett.
Gossett's first marriage to Hattie Glasgow was annulled. His second marriage was to Christina Mangosing, and ended in divorce in 1975, as happened with actor Cindy James Reese in 1992.
